By Chloe B. McAlpin, Staff Writer, Emerson College
Has anyone here read A Clockwork Orange? Or maybe seen the movie? I read it this summer and though I thought it was an amazing novel. I was also extremely horrified by it’s context. In the story a gang of sixteen year old boys goes around murdering people and raping girls, laughing as they go. The casualness in which these teenagers talked about and committed their crimes was the scariest part for me. They were emotionless to the cries and begging of their victims. Instead they laughed at them and claimed their victims deserved it. I finished the book, shuddered a bit, and thanked god that the main character Alex DeLarge, wasn’t real.
But then I read about the Roastbusters. The Roastbusters, also referred to as the Rape Boys, are a group of teenage boys in New Zealand who go around getting underage girls extremely intoxicated and then raping them. Many of the girls are raped by multiple boys at a time and are usually blacking out from too much alcohol consumption. After the rape the Roastbusters proceed to put videos up on social media sights publicly naming and shaming the girls they have just assaulted. Many of their posts call for other boys to join in on their crusade by using popular hash tags like #RoastBusterTakeover.
Has anyone here read A Clockwork Orange? Or maybe seen the movie? I read it this summer and though I thought it was an amazing novel. I was also extremely horrified by it’s context. In the story a gang of sixteen year old boys goes around murdering people and raping girls, laughing as they go. The casualness in which these teenagers talked about and committed their crimes was the scariest part for me. They were emotionless to the cries and begging of their victims. Instead they laughed at them and claimed their victims deserved it. I finished the book, shuddered a bit, and thanked god that the main character Alex DeLarge, wasn’t real.
But then I read about the Roastbusters. The Roastbusters, also referred to as the Rape Boys, are a group of teenage boys in New Zealand who go around getting underage girls extremely intoxicated and then raping them. Many of the girls are raped by multiple boys at a time and are usually blacking out from too much alcohol consumption. After the rape the Roastbusters proceed to put videos up on social media sights publicly naming and shaming the girls they have just assaulted. Many of their posts call for other boys to join in on their crusade by using popular hash tags like #RoastBusterTakeover.
But it’s not all fun and games for the Rape Boys. They consider raping girls to be work, not a joke. In their internet video three Roastbusters (one with his face blurred out) lounge in a car and talk about their “jobs”. The boys seriously explain that they “take time out of [their] daily lives to find a girl to roast” and that “[raping girls] is a fucking job, [they] don’t do this shit for pleasure”. The boys simile and laugh together as they reminisce about past “roasts”. One Roastbuster admitted later that he had sex with a thirteen-year-old intoxicated girl when he was sixteen. Is this starting to sound familiar?
I, like any sane human being, was horrified that the Roastbusters existed. Apparently there wasn’t just one but multiple Alex Delarges running around raping young girls. When I researched the group I got even more disgusted. The Roastbusters use Facebook as their main social media sight and have been uploading their rape videos on the Roastbuster page since 2011. And what is worse, the New Zealand police have been aware of them since then. What?! How can this be legal you ask? Well according to New Zealand law and Detective Inspector Bruce Scott, the police can't do anything because “none of the [rape victims] have been brave enough to make formal statements to [the police]” and that “without formal evidence [the police’s] hands are tied." None of the girls have complained because they have either been too traumatized or too embarrassed by their public shaming to report their rapists. That, to me, has to be the worst part.
The victims of the Roastbuster rapes are so ashamed that they cannot even ask for help. What kind of culture do we live in where underage girls (some as young thirteen) are mocked and blamed for being raped? What kind society blames the victims of rape so much that the girls become too embarrassed to prosecute their rapists? That culture, my little brothers and sisters, is rape culture.
Rape culture, according to Marshall University, “is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture.” What is a better example of rape culture then a group of boys legally raping and then blaming their victims? And it’s not just the Roastbusters shaming the girls. A group page made in appreciation of the Roastbusters wrote that the Rape Boys are “Outing the sluts giving them the treatment they deserve.” Similarly an ex girlfriend of one of the Rhostbusters claims that “the girls that [were raped] gave them consent and even went back for more!” Consent is obviously something that people need to reconsider when a blacked out thirteen year old is involved.
And isn’t this story and these attitudes familiar? Sure, A Clockwork Orange comes to mind again, but that’s a fabricated story written in the 1960s. How about the recent case in Steubenville where a girl was videotaped being raped while unconscious at a party? When the victim took her rapists to court the boys’ lawyers claimed that if the judge put sexual assault on their record the two boys would have “to deal with the ramifications of the convictions for the rest of their lives”. There seems to be a lot more sympathy for rapist then there are for their victims.
I, like any sane human being, was horrified that the Roastbusters existed. Apparently there wasn’t just one but multiple Alex Delarges running around raping young girls. When I researched the group I got even more disgusted. The Roastbusters use Facebook as their main social media sight and have been uploading their rape videos on the Roastbuster page since 2011. And what is worse, the New Zealand police have been aware of them since then. What?! How can this be legal you ask? Well according to New Zealand law and Detective Inspector Bruce Scott, the police can't do anything because “none of the [rape victims] have been brave enough to make formal statements to [the police]” and that “without formal evidence [the police’s] hands are tied." None of the girls have complained because they have either been too traumatized or too embarrassed by their public shaming to report their rapists. That, to me, has to be the worst part.
The victims of the Roastbuster rapes are so ashamed that they cannot even ask for help. What kind of culture do we live in where underage girls (some as young thirteen) are mocked and blamed for being raped? What kind society blames the victims of rape so much that the girls become too embarrassed to prosecute their rapists? That culture, my little brothers and sisters, is rape culture.
Rape culture, according to Marshall University, “is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture.” What is a better example of rape culture then a group of boys legally raping and then blaming their victims? And it’s not just the Roastbusters shaming the girls. A group page made in appreciation of the Roastbusters wrote that the Rape Boys are “Outing the sluts giving them the treatment they deserve.” Similarly an ex girlfriend of one of the Rhostbusters claims that “the girls that [were raped] gave them consent and even went back for more!” Consent is obviously something that people need to reconsider when a blacked out thirteen year old is involved.
And isn’t this story and these attitudes familiar? Sure, A Clockwork Orange comes to mind again, but that’s a fabricated story written in the 1960s. How about the recent case in Steubenville where a girl was videotaped being raped while unconscious at a party? When the victim took her rapists to court the boys’ lawyers claimed that if the judge put sexual assault on their record the two boys would have “to deal with the ramifications of the convictions for the rest of their lives”. There seems to be a lot more sympathy for rapist then there are for their victims.
In both the Steubenville and Roastbuster cases people put the blame on the victims. My question is how? How and why are people blaming these teenage girls for something that was forced on them and they had no control over? Even the girls who knowingly hung out with the Roastbusters (in an internet video a Roastbuster coldly claimed that some girls ask to hang out with the Rhostbusters and that they “know what they’re in for”), do they then deserve to be sexually assaulted? A lot of people seem to think that they do. According to them the punishment for drinking too much and making a bad choice is to be brutally raped and then publicly shamed for it.
Two friends of the Roastbusters, when asked if a thirteen year old girl could really “want it” responded that they didn’t think a “little girl...should be there” at a party. The two teenagers never commented that that this “little girl” shouldn’t have been raped, just that it was her fault for being there at a party where a “roast” was taking place.
I don’t think it even needs to be said, but I will write it just so you all get a very clear message from this article: It was not these girls' fault that they got raped. It is never the victim’s fault, ever. It is these boys’ fault, the boys who made a quirky little name for their group of rapist friends just to show us how funny they think sexual assault is. The fact that these boys, and anyone else for that matter, can even fathom to put blame on the young girls who were raped is disgusting. A Clockwork Orange was an interesting book to read but I think it’s safe to say that we don’t want a gang similar to Alex and his droogs on our streets in real life.
Want to learn more?
Chloe B. McAlpin is a Writing, Literature, and Publishing major at Emerson College. Originally from Florida, Chloe enjoys crunchy orange leaves, used bookstores, and Simon & Garfunkel. If she had to pick a favorite animal it would be a Persian cat, and if she had to pick a favorite person it would be Virginia Woolf. Contact Chloe on her Twitter.
Images: NYDailyNews.com, thedailyblog.co.nz, Corbis
Two friends of the Roastbusters, when asked if a thirteen year old girl could really “want it” responded that they didn’t think a “little girl...should be there” at a party. The two teenagers never commented that that this “little girl” shouldn’t have been raped, just that it was her fault for being there at a party where a “roast” was taking place.
I don’t think it even needs to be said, but I will write it just so you all get a very clear message from this article: It was not these girls' fault that they got raped. It is never the victim’s fault, ever. It is these boys’ fault, the boys who made a quirky little name for their group of rapist friends just to show us how funny they think sexual assault is. The fact that these boys, and anyone else for that matter, can even fathom to put blame on the young girls who were raped is disgusting. A Clockwork Orange was an interesting book to read but I think it’s safe to say that we don’t want a gang similar to Alex and his droogs on our streets in real life.
Want to learn more?
Chloe B. McAlpin is a Writing, Literature, and Publishing major at Emerson College. Originally from Florida, Chloe enjoys crunchy orange leaves, used bookstores, and Simon & Garfunkel. If she had to pick a favorite animal it would be a Persian cat, and if she had to pick a favorite person it would be Virginia Woolf. Contact Chloe on her Twitter.
Images: NYDailyNews.com, thedailyblog.co.nz, Corbis